


Before Space and Beyond

by lycorishione



Series: To Get to Where They Are, First You Must Know Where They Have Been [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 18:39:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12282204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lycorishione/pseuds/lycorishione
Summary: ‘Civilian class’.Those two words made his throat close up and his heart sink. Civilians stayed on Earth. Civilians played support to the pilots who got to climb into a real shuttle and launch themselves into space. Civilians didn’t go into space.Lance was so close, just barely missing the cut-off for fighter class.“It’s a shame,” the instructor had said, looking down at him with pity in her eyes. “With your scores, any other year you would’ve made it.”Lance heard this:you were good, but not good enough.





	Before Space and Beyond

**Author's Note:**

> Can you believe it took me 10 months to finish this one fic
> 
> It's almost TGTWTA's first anniversary too. I didn't realize until I was done. Anyway, with this TGTWTA is officially complete! 
> 
> Beta as always by the ever-patient [fickleauthor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fickleauthor) who had had to tolerate my nonsense.
> 
> Disclaimer: I intended for all the pre-canon fics to work in the same timeline but because it's been literally 10 months since I first started this, there might be some small discrepancies, especially with [A Hop and A Skip and A Jump](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8920849). So uh, kindly ignore them or discreetly point them out so I can correct them.

In a family as big as his, probability stated that something was bound to repeat. The younger you were, the more likely it became.

As the third youngest in a family of eight, not including his parents and grandparents, Lance wondered if his family had already reached its saturation point.

Don’t get him wrong; he was proud of his siblings, of what they had accomplished with their time on Earth. They were gregarious, larger than life, and filled with wanderlust, every last one of them. They seemed to think life was too short for them to do everything they wanted, so they made sure every second was time well-spent. Between his two parents, two grandparents, and five older siblings, they had probably traveled the entire planet by now.

Their shadows were both warm and suffocating. They had done so much already, lived their lives to its fullest, what more could Lance do with his? In comparison to everyone’s individual lists of accomplishments, Lance’s was strikingly lacking. Even his little siblings had talents he never possessed: music for his brother, art for his sister, both Lance was glaringly aware he lacked. Instead, he had graduated middle school, broke an arm during a hoverboard mishap, and gotten turned down by every person he asked out. Nothing nobody had done before.

(The misguided goth phase, though something entirely unique to Lance, was not to be mentioned. It was a Mistake.

And besides, Granddad had a punk phase in his youth, which was close enough.)

* * *

One night, Lance shot up from bed, mind whirling, and whacked his head against the roof of the upper bunk. No one was around to tease him for it; his older siblings had long since moved to college dorms, and his younger ones weren’t old enough to sleep away from his parents.

He looked out his room’s little window. The view was familiar. A cluster of buildings, all identical in layout, separated by long grey roads. Street lamps lined them, each shining a small radius of yellow bright enough to see by, gentle enough to not disturb the sleeping residents. Above them, the moon hung low, tonight a bright plump circle. It was the same view he saw when he was six and finally allowed to move to the older kids’ room, when he was ten and crying over a broken arm, when he was twelve and realized he wanted to kiss boys as much as girls.

Now, at fifteen, it was slightly different. He saw the same old buildings, the same old street lamps, the bright white moon. He also saw the stars that dotted the black of the night sky, the void between each weak sparkle, and the deep unknown beyond them.

His family had traveled the world, but there was an entire universe out there, untouched and unexplored and new.

Lance took a deep breath and realized how tight his chest felt, how tense his shoulders were. He looked down and saw his hands fisted into his blankets, nails digging into the weave. 

He had to go out there, where there was nothing but the stars and distant planets and silent space. See and touch what was alien to the Earth he lived on. Leave footsteps where no human had tread and for those in the future to find.

It was exciting. It was dizzying. Best of all, it was  _ different _ .

* * *

_ 'Civilian class’. _

Those two words made his throat close up and his heart sink. Civilians stayed on Earth. Civilians played support to the pilots who got to climb into a real shuttle and launch themselves into space. Civilians didn’t go into space.

Lance was so close, just barely missing the cut-off for fighter class. 

“It’s a shame,” the instructor had said, looking down at him with pity in her eyes. “With your scores, any other year you would’ve made it.”

Lance heard this:  _ you were good, but not good enough. _

* * *

Lance walked into the classroom, eyes to the floor, legs like lead, and threw himself into a seat at the back of the room. It was early. Most of the two hundred students were still missing, and those present either had their heads shoved into the crook of their elbow or were staring off into space with their chins propped up on their hands.

At the other end of the row Lance was sat at, a boy with the absolute worst haircut Lance ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on was reading the class essential textbook, a maroon doorstopper with lines of white running down the spine and the protective coating rubbing off the edges, exposing the soft core of the covers.

It took Lance a moment to place the haircut. He snapped his fingers in victory when he remembered, startling the girl in front of him badly and making her knock her knees against the underside of the table. “Mullet,” he said, ignoring the death glare she leveled at him over her shoulder.

Mullet slowly looked up from his textbook, as though he was unsure if he was imagining things. He turned to Lance, eyebrows furrowed in the most adorable way. “Sorry, what?” 

“That’s a mullet,” Lance said, rubbing the back of his neck with both hands to illustrate his point. “The hairstyle, not the fish. What is this, the 1980s?”

Mullet covered the tail of his hair with one gloved hand, cheeks lightly dusted with red. “What’s it to you?” He tried to snarl, but it just made him look like an angry kitten. Lance was sure there was a dopey grin on his face, but he couldn’t force it away no matter how hard he tried.

Because he had no brain-to-mouth filter, he replied, “You look like an angry kitten.”

Mullet was bright red right now, incredulous. Lance snorted, then pretended to cough into his palm.

The lecturer entered then, and snatched everyone’s attention. When Lance turned to face the front, a suspicious number of heads turned away from his direction. He hadn’t noticed the rest of the students file in, or how they were obviously watching Lance’s and Mullet’s exchange.

Before he could dwell further on it, the lesson started proper, and Lance had to keep his attention on her to keep from falling behind.

* * *

Here’s the thing: civilian class and fighter class student pilots took the same basic classes in the first year, with occasional overlapping classes with other divisions. They both fly big ships, it made sense to put them together before they moved onto more advanced and specialized content.

Here’s the thing: fighter class pilots regularly top the charts in everything. Written exams, practicals, class participation even, because they were the best of the best. That was how they got into fighter class to begin with, and the instructors waste no time rubbing in how much smarter, more hardworking, more diligent they were than the civilian class pilots, no matter how smart, or hardworking, or diligent they actually were.

Here’s the thing: Keith Kogane, or Mullet, as Lance knew him as, rapidly showed himself to be top in all his classes, and thus the most common subject of praise. He also quickly showed he had a temper and was not afraid to get physical, although nothing really came out of it thus far.

It didn’t take a genius to work out what happened next.

* * *

What happened next was months in the making, after Lance had fully settled into Garrison life and managed to find a friend in a warm and gentle engineer-in-training, but it didn’t go exactly as predicted.

Hunk dropped his tray on the table and asked, “Did you hear about Keith?”

Lance, having just shoveled mash potatoes into his mouth, replied, “Nof?” Although Lance liked to keep himself up to date with all the latest gossip, gossip about Keith was nearly non-existent. Guy kept to himself, and Lance respected that. After their first conversation, Lance could count the number of words exchanged between them on one hand.

It was not for lack of effort. Keith didn’t take the news of the failed Kerberos mission very well. Nobody did, but him worst of all. Any attempts on Lance’s part to approach him were swiftly brushed off and ignored.

“He got into a fight,” Hunk said, pointing at his face. “Gave him a black eye and nearly broke his nose.”

Lance swallowed before his food could escape his slack jaws. “He  _ punched _ a student?” 

Hunk laughed. “Oh no, worse. He punched Iverson.”

* * *

“Nice eyepatch, sir,” Lance said, subtly wiping his sweaty palms on his pants. Iverson narrowed his good eye from behind his desk, thoroughly unamused. Lance couldn’t help it, jokes helped him cope with stress. He wilted slightly. “Sorry.”

“Congratulations, cadet,” Iverson said, pushing a piece of paper towards Lance, “you’ve been promoted to fighter class.”

Lance blinked at Iverson, uncomprehending. The annual health check-up was half a year ago, but Lance thought he should go in to get his hearing tested again. “I’m sorry?”

Iverson sighed, rubbing his face with one hand. “We have a vacancy after the... incident. Your instructors thought highly of you, and enough of them pushed for your promotion. You’re fighter class now.”

Lance finally looked down at that piece of paper. It was an acceptance form, asking for his signature at the bottom. If he signed it, he’ll be fighter class. His dreams would come true.

He reached out to touch it, but Iverson yanked it back right before Lance’s fingers made contact.

“Don’t make me regret it, cadet,” he spat.

Lance swallowed, nodded, and signed.

* * *

At the beginning, there wasn’t much of a difference. His classes and content didn’t change, his instructors and classmates were the same. It didn’t seem like a big deal, except it was.

His family were ecstatic when he told them the good news and Hunk went along with his plans to sneak out of the dorms to celebrate without so much as a token protest.

His instructors looked at him with more weight now, though, and, as much as Lance tried to think otherwise, the way the other students looked at him changed as well.

His civilian class classmates were colder, their words slowly gaining an edge to them. His fighter class classmates either barely spared him a glance or purposefully clipped his shoulder as they walked past.

Only Hunk stayed the same, and Lance clung onto him amidst this sea of change. It would blow over with the new year, Lance thought. Surely it would.

* * *

It didn’t. 

* * *

By his third year, almost nobody remembered the name ‘Keith Kogane’. The younger students only knew of the boy who punched a teacher and got expelled. The older students had more important things to fill their minds with. The instructors remembered his brilliance and talent, but never spoke his name. 

Lance remembered. He remembered that quiet boy with the weird hair and talent for flying and wicked temper. It was hard to forget when Keith’s shadow hung over him every day, after all.

When his classmates whispered and laughed behind his back with words like ‘upstart’ and ‘cargo pilot’, when his instructors either passed over him or paused, bracing themselves, right before calling on him, when Iverson took every opportunity, every mistake big or small he made, to remind him of how  _ lucky _ he was to be where he was standing, of what the Garrison lost to fit him in.

No, Lance remembered Keith Kogane, that quiet boy with the weird hair and talent for flying and wicked temper. It was hard to forget somebody you hated, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/herekittiew)   
>  [tumblr](http://herekittie-writes.tumblr.com)


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